Depends on if you're a game historican. For its time it was a nice little gem, although with some flaws. From today's perspective, there are better games for sure, if you're not looking especially for a Vampire game or Vampire The Masquerade ruleset.

The first half of the game is quite decent, dense atmosphere, interesting story, great visuals for its time and its character system was one of the best I think. Also the twist in the middle of the game was an unusual and therefor sursprising move. However, the second half of the game becomes more and more repetitive, the quality of level design drops to average at best. With guns, AI becomes more and more of a problem. For example, AI doesn't recognize walls and wastes its ammo firing into doorframes. But nothing you couldn't handle, if you really want to play the game.

It's important to patch the game, because the vanilla version only allows to save in your coffin/safe harbor. With 1.1 they added a global save option.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
hmm, never could play that game for too long. any kind words on his behalf?

VtM: R is one of those sad cases of "everything is great except the game-play." The controls are clunky (this game really needed an isometric viewpoint beside this over-the-shoulder camera which is quite limiting), hit detection is weird and delayed, your allies are so dumb they can't do anything effective on their own and you constantly have to switch between them so they don't kill themselves and most of the skills are useless and impractical, but few are overpowered (like the one that gives you claws). I really hate it when the skills are unbalanced.

Still, the game is quite fun to play if you get the hang of it. The whole dark medieval atmosphere was unique and the realistic "high and mighty" religious nature of the main character Christoph was amusing and unlike anything I have seen in video-game protagonists. Although all this impression is based on the first quarter of the game (Prague), because I lost my save file as soon as I entered Vienna. I have to start over and this texture pack might motivate me to do so. But I wish they make HDTP texture packs for other cities too, because as far as I could see, there were only two texture packs: one for general objects like doors and walls and one for Prague.

I have very fond memories of that game. When it was released in 2000 it was bashed by the gamers for being a linear game. I think people expected much non-linearity after being spoiled by games like Baldur's Gate. Story telling was great and graphics were way ahead of its time. In vanilla version you couldn't save anywhere, but then patch 1,1 came with that feature. I didn't have any problems with controls, game could be played with RTwP system. I recommend every RPG fan to try this game, especially if you like story heavy games. This mod is a good excuse to install the game once more.

— "Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."
Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man